Misguided Maillard Mania

Misguided Maillard Mania

Design Details: Brewing Reinvented at ULA Café in Melbourne

Welcome to Design Details, an ongoing editorial feature in Daily Coffee News focused on individual examples of coffee shop architecture, interior design, packaging design or branding. If you are a coffee…


Breaking New Ground: A Sicilian Coffee Plantation, Part 2

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María Andrée Is Honing Olfactory Skills in Antigua 

A sensorial class in Guatemala at Artista de Café teaches how to use your nose for the ultimate coffee experience. BY JORDAN BUCHANANBARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE Photos courtesy of Arista de Café Walking into a specialty café in Guatemala, your nostrils are infused with aromas from the best coffees in the country. Your nose recollects the […]


Is the World Barista Championship too exclusive & expensive for competitors?

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Misguided Maillard Mania

PRF El Salvador announces speakers and panellists

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Oklahoma’s T3 Roasters Completes a Historic Opening

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The Slingshot Chalice Puts a New Spin on Espresso Dosing

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Joven and Atucún Join Forces to Empower Young Farmers

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Misguided Maillard Mania

Congrats to the Top-Ranking Qualifiers at U.S. CoffeeChamps Denver

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Ukraine’s Soloway Coffee Opens First US Shop in Chicago

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Brewing at Home and On the Road with Darrin Daniel

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Exploring the Potential of Drones in Coffee Production 

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Misguided Maillard Mania

Misguided Maillard Mania

minimum dose size?

Jan 31, 2024 |

I use the Hario switch to brew my coffee and am trying to reduce my caffeine consumption. Hence I would like to brew smaller cups of coffee. I am currently using 10g of coffee with 160g of water. (1:16 Ratio) I am wondering if there is a minimum amount of coffee...

Misguided Maillard Mania

If you read the coffee-internet enough, you are guaranteed to be more confused about roasting than you were before reading it. One of the more confusing bits of roasting advice I hear often is to “extend the Maillard phase” of a roast. The internet seems to believe more time in the Maillard phase has predictably beneficial results.

One challenge in roasting is when a roaster makes a single change from batch to batch, tastes a difference, and then declares that one aspect of that change (eg lower gas, lower ET, longer Maillard phase, longer roast time, etc) responsible for the change in flavor. Unfortunately, to be confident in the cause-and-effect relationship, one would have to make that change countless times, under controlled conditions, and make extreme efforts to rule out other possible causes of the new result. It’s painstaking work, which is why scientists often spend years and millions of dollars to study the effects of a small change in a system—often without clear answers despite the time and effort!

A few thoughts on why the standard Maillard-phase thinking is questionable:  

  • Extending the Maillard phase necessarily means lowering and flattening the ROR, reaching first crack at a lower ROR, and increasing the risk of an ROR crash. There is no way to change just one variable in roasting— every change creates a chain reaction.

  • Extending the Maillard phase results in Maillard reactions happening at a slower rate. If you double the time in the Maillard phase, you may approximately halve the rate of Maillard reactions (this is a guess; I don’t know the exact change, but the relationship of Maillard phase time to Maillard products is not remotely linear, and no one really knows the relationship yet.) So, it’s possible the net change in Maillard products is negligible. I do not believe this issue has been studied thoroughly.

  • One can easily create two equivalent-tasting roasts of quite different total durations and Maillard-phase durations. For example, a 7:00 sample roast may taste nearly identical to a 13:00 production roast. This fact alone negates the standard Maillard thinking.

  • It is suspicious that no one ever seems to recommend shortening the Maillard phase. The implication seems to be “more is better.” Every good practice in roasting seems to have a “happy medium.” I can’t think of any instance where more is always better. This is a red flag indicating the proponents of longer Maillard phases are just repeating a trendy idea and don’t really know what’s optimal.

  • Focusing on balancing the time in various phases is extremely difficult and will almost necessarily lead a roaster to sacrifice curve shape, consistency, and predictability.

The bottom line is that roasting is complex. Most of what one reads online is false. Knowing a factoid about chemistry is not the basis for a roasting system. It’s an excellent practice to form opinions slowly, and only after exhaustive testing. 

 

 

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Misguided Maillard Mania

Perfect Little Beans

Chinmey Hill Coffee uses specialty-grade beans with zero primary defects (such as black beans or sour beans) and less than five secondary defects (such as broken beans). This is important because primary defects will greatly affect the taste of the coffee. Having zero defects allows the coffee to be the most optimal flavor.

Window for Optimal Flavor

Chimney Hill Coffee ships our coffee the same day it was roasted, so you will receive it before it enters the window of optimal flavor.  This means you’ll never miss the opportunity to enjoy the coffee’s peak flavor.

Coffee Ratings

Coffee undergoes many scoring processes by professionals who achieved their Q Grader certification. Coffee is first graded when it’s green. If there are defects the coffee is determined to be “not-specialty grade”. For those coffees that pass green grading, they are sample roasted and cupped. (Cupping is the official term for critically tasting and scoring coffees. The official cupping form is standard worldwide, and where the 100-point scoring system comes from.) A coffee’s dry fragrance, wet aroma, flavor, aftertaste, body, acidity, balance, and overall impression are taken into consideration while uniformity issues and defects, will lower the overall score.

Specialty Coffee

Specialty coffee, coined by Erna Knutsen in 1974, refers to a coffee that receives a quality grading score of 80 percent or higher. While “premium” or “gourmet” seem like they’re synonymous with “specialty,” they simply are marketing terms with no defined standards. Specialty coffees are grown in specific and ideal micro-climates, and have distinctive and unique flavor profiles, with little to no defects.

Third-Wave Coffee

We’re currently in the third wave of coffee. The first wave of American coffee put pre-ground, vacuum-sealed cans in kitchens across America. The second wave started with the late ‘60s introduction of Peet’s coffee (by Alfred Peet) through the proliferation of Starbucks. The third wave of coffee focuses on origin transparency, nuanced flavors, and artisan roasting. The term “third wave” is synonymous with specialty coffee.

Misguided Maillard Mania

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